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Free as in Beer Syndrome?

I wonder what Weta was expecting. They got a massive clustered environment and they have a very capable and scalable OS running it. Running that environment will have to be supported. What did they think? That Redhat and the community were going to get warm fuzzies and maintain their rig for free?

The OS is Free as in speech not free as in beer. You'd expect a company, that works in the multi-billion dollar special effects industry, would know that equipment doesn't come free of cost. Weta doesn't want to maintain it's setup itself, is it really that strange when you ask someone else to look after the setup, that they want some reward for their work?

In any case, Weta is better off with GNU/Linux than that other system. Weta has the option of switching to another vendor. Would they have had that if their solution came from Redmond? If they do want to go the non-commercial route (they erroneously name it free) they could go with Whitebox Linux and have the non-commercial version of their Redhat setup. They only have to maintain it themselves or hire someone else than Redhat to do that.

Exactly, Linux excuse me Gnu/Linux is Free as in freedom. If Weta needed to tweak the kernel to give more performace that is now possible. If You can hire one or two guys to maintain the system for you, then you can drop the RH contracts, and compile updates yourself.

That's called freedom. You don't need Red hat, you need Red Hat's software, and you pay for Red hat experts.

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